Celebrating people who bring the Internet to life

Blog Posts for 2017

Internet service that’s truly accessible everywhere is one step closer to becoming a reality as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has, for the first time, given a company permission to build a next-generation satellite Internet service that promises to be both ultra-fast and affordable.

OneWeb, according to The Washington Post, will target U.S. consumers, “providing broadband anywhere in the U.S., particularly in rural areas where it can be difficult to provide fast Internet connections using traditional ground-based cables.” According to the Post, the new network will be built on a fleet of 720 satellites, which will orbit earth at an altitude of around 745 miles, and service could start as early as 2019. The approval from the FCC gives the company the ability to use airwaves that will beam the Internet down to earth.

“Satellite Internet services are available now. But today's technology is slow, expensive and largely out-of-reach for individual consumers. For a connection barely fast enough to support Netflix, users can spend up to $200 a day — making it realistic only for corporate customers or, in some cases, relief workers responding to natural disasters where connectivity is a must. By contrast, the next generation of...

Gihan Dias is an active member of Sri Lanka’s Internet Society, but he has turned his focus away from building networks to developing Internet-based applications to advance his country.

The first app, he told the Internet Hall of Fame, involves using technology to help the government meet its requirement to communicate with a population that speaks different languages.

“Although we also use English, Sri Lanka has two national languages,” Dias noted. “One of the biggest problems is that we have two communities who speak different languages and so cannot talk to each other. This was a root cause of the 20-year civil war in our country, and if we want to avoid another war, we must enable people to communicate with each other.

So, translation is very important, especially for the government. They are required by law to provide services in both national languages, but they have been unable to fulfill that requirement. We are helping them do so.”

A second project focuses on e-learning.

“Again, this came from a national requirement,” Dias said. “We have a secondary school exam around age 16. Mathematics is compulsory. You have to pass.”

But nationally, about 50 percent fail mathematics, meaning they fail the entire exam, and subsequently cannot even go to a technical college.

Dias is working to set up an online tutoring system to help students pass.

“What we do is we give them problems to solve on-line,” he said. “If they...

When Gihan Dias wrote his first computer program in the late 1970s, he had never seen a computer. “I learned BASIC programming from a book, and wrote programs on paper,” he said. When he actually got to use a computer—in 1979—he knew he had found his passion.

A few years later he met the Internet, which became his career-long focus.

Dias was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014 as a Global Connector for his role in setting up and the running the academic Internet in Sri Lanka, which started with the country’s pioneering e-mail system, LEARNmail.

He was also instrumental in setting up the country’s top-level domain registry, .lk and was the founder-president of the Lanka Academic Network, or LAcNet, a nonprofit dedicated to providing Internet access in Sri Lanka. LAcNet gave Lankan expatriates a way to keep in touch with their homeland.

So what stands out most from a 30-plus year career with a list of achievements that would make anyone proud? Getting Sri Lanka’s e-mail system—and then Internet—running, Dias reflected recently in an exclusive interview with the Internet Hall of Fame.

“What we did right at the beginning was a key achievement because it is really difficult to get people to understand the benefits of Internet, especially to get them to provide money or other resources, when they have no experience in what you are talking about,” he said. “Once we had the first networks it was easy to show it’s working and the...

There are now more than a billion sites and counting on the web. By comparison, in 1995, the year that saw the launch of both Amazon and AltaVista, there were just 23,500.

Before launching its own website, The New York Times published a “site seeing” guide to the World Wide Web in January 1995, highlighting 26 websites for online rookies to visit.

In April, The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance revisited those early recommendations, only to discover that more than 20 of the sites are no longer online and a handful are only available through archives.

“Most of the URLs the Times printed in 1995 are now dead, including those that led to a guide for backpackers and wilderness trekkers; a livestream of a coffee pot; a Grateful Dead fan page; a map of estuaries; a federal spending website; a hub for online gaming; a gardening site; a site devoted to legislation affecting Massachusetts; Wired’s coverage of legal issues in cyberspace; Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology; a graphic novel about living with cancer; an illustrated explanation of an infamous flaw in Intel's Pentium chip; a cybermall; a site for making hotel reservations in San Francisco; a site dedicated to subway routes; a virtual frog dissection; a wine-tasting club; a digital...

In this exclusive video from the Internet Hall of Fame archives, 2014 IHOF inductee Susan Estradadescribes the 1988 creation of CERFnet, one of the original regional IP networks, and talks about how she and her team built an Internet network that everyone could use. CERFnet logged a number of notable ‘firsts’ for the Internet, including the first commercial network.

Dr. Estrada discusses the challenges of getting people to use the Internet at the time, and shares how a female superhero named ‘Captain Internet’ brought a whole new generation into the digital future through the formation of interconnectivity.